Hi Brice, Brice Waegeneire <br...@waegenei.re> skribis:
> On 2021-03-03 15:13, Ludovic Courtès wrote: [...] >> I looked a bit at man-db, thinking it must have that already done >> more >> or less. Indeed, one can run “mandb -uc” to create the database. >> The problem is that it insists on writing databases and >> ‘CACHEDIR.TAG’ >> files in the same directory as man pages. In our case, these are all >> read-only, so just prints a warning for each directory and keeps going. >> It looks like man-db is not written with a situation like ours in >> mind. > > What about using mandoc¹, the manpage compiler from OpenBSD, instead of > man-db? As from it's manual it support specifying the database location: > > “makewhatis -d dir [file ...]”² > > It isn't packaged in Guix yet, but other Linux distros have done it, > some > are even using it as their default. Sounds like a plan! We’d need to update the “Documentation” node in the manual accordingly. Do you want to give it a try? >> [...] >> One option I contemplated at one point is to simply have fewer man >> pages >> in the first place. :-) There were packages that install man pages >> when they shouldn’t. This led to commits like >> 305eefc0627eb1d047e6fc4320d7e56897719ab8 and >> 4b797193d7508ddc53bb1ff7a267a0d50c1fe298 (and parent commits). > > More outputs would be great tho having a way to force the installation > of > specifics outputs for every installed package would improve quality of > live. For a specific example in that case, when installing ncurses from > the cli it would install it's man output too if you always want man > page > to be installed. Hmm sounds tricky (and kinda unpredictable, too). Thanks, Ludo’.
